> Do your research assignment properly. Remember that any encyclopedia is a starting point for research, not an ending point.
The problem is that students nowadays (want to) believe that they can find all Information in the net - and that without even logging in to the electronic Journals provided by their library. Even if you find some infromation you should not cite it in that way. The point is not accuracy, but the point is givig scientific tribute to the original authors if the work. So if you say, for example "quantum mechanics was discovered in the beginning of the last century [x]" then [x] could possibly be a reference to an overview Article which celebrates quantum mechanics hundreth birthday, but if you say "the quantization of atomic orbitals [y]", the [y] is no overvie article, no Wikipedia statement but it is somethin with 1905 in it and the name Planck.
If you find the collection of References in a Wikipedia article *particularly good* (e.g. much better, more comprehensive and more up-to-date) that the Physical Review which the Wikipedia article is based upon, you may use the term "An overview of the subject can be found in [y] and the references therein". Let me however clearly state that if the topic of your semester paper is "path integrals" I personally would not accept if a student hand me over something on path integrals where Wikipedia if mentioned, but NOT Feynmans original Paper. One other bad habit which I observed is (regarding standards) to point to some Web page, where documentation is available. If a standard (the case where I remember it was a Color Managment Standard) is so important that you mention it's name and a so central topic that you believe a citation is needed, then PLEASE: Standards have a year, a name (sometimes complex), usually a number, and very important: the organization responsible. It should be clearly visible from your Reference that Postscript was issued by Adobe (Don't cite some obscure textbook, this may cause the impression that the Adobe Postscript is just one Implementation of the language) and that, on the other hand some specific Version of C you used is ANSI compliant (so don't cite the microsoft C reference manual if you were asked to validate that a certain statement is ANSI compliant).
My recommendation: log in to you libraries electronic yournals. I can now only give this advice for Physics, but there you should as a student try to figure out which "Physical Review" (Be aware that PRL has short papers, whle PR has the long ones) covers your topic (It is very likely that there is some which does, especially in theoretical physics). Read the abstract and think about it (no connection to the net during thinking!). Can you translate it to your language (modern, more appropriate for students)? If no: look which works cite this article. Follow the most cited ones - it might be that you find the formulation [x] and articles cited therein very appropriate when you arrived at a suitable article (however if it is a 100page article, you may give the reader a hint about the section.....). Recurse this until you understand the first article.
Wikipedia is only good for finding the first article.
Nothing will solve this problem other than having the users educated and responsible. Instead of finally telling to the users that they should take the responsibility for their system right now the approach is to make fucking heuristic schemes or to silently make the assumption that a certificate issued by a list of organization is valid. Instead of putting an simple explanation besides the Warning dialog when you open a web page which enables the user to find out whom he actually trusts to, the dialog boxes for self-signed certificates and such signed by an CA look quite similar to the normal user. Morover in everydays life nearly nobody uses ceritifactes. One approach would be to sell one certificate per Computer (or OS license) right when you buy it. And the users should be asked when they would like to sign (and encrypt!) something (e.g. email!). Moreover they should be explained how they can easily sign things themself. And an simple to use scheme should be implemented which allows to say something like: Trust everybody whom my direct contact trust to. Take the Administrator of your Company in your Adressbook and because he trusts certain company signatures (for certain purposes eg. installing drivers) you will not be bothered in the future when a company did only sign the drivers using a certificate not issued by a CA.
Guiding the users to more responsibility is the only thing which can help - in all security affairs.
What exactly makes you believe that a cesar cyper (and "rotating" the letters is nothing else) increases the security? As I said there is too little entropy in this. Would I be given the task to enhance a malware in a way that it works against this scheme i would only have to grab the first letter "button" displayed (always at the same position -> easy), compare it to all letters (easy, they do not even put noise on the buttons) and add its character value to the standard table. So the task which this piece of software should solve (malware infected computers) is only solved under the assumption that all malware writers are incompetent idiots, who will use keyloggers forever.
Benefits of this protection scheme: *protects against yesterdays (at the time when it will be widely used) malware on the users computer
Disadvantages: * frustrates user (i tried to enter a longer passwd using the rotation scheme) * a malware which is aware of the scheme can bypass it with at most (number of pixels to compare for first letter)*(letters to compare) ~8000 byte comparisons. On a modern processor if you implement it well this should take only a few S per entered digit * maybe: timing analysis on the network * increased server load * over slow connections or connections with lag (GPRS,VPN) this scheme makes the user feel the lag * increased transfer cost on mobile devices (if you go online in a foreing country with your mobile phone you might prefer to avoid such things
At least in their demo the entropy in the assignment between the coordinates and the numbers input is completely missing. Not a good "encryption" or "security" scheme.
Full Ack. If you work for somebody and you are paid for that there are three possibilities:
1) Everything is ok and you know that everything is ok
2) Something is wrong and you know that it is wrong (wrong in the sense of being illegal). Estimate (maybe with the help of a lawyer) if you commit a crime by supporting your employers position. Luckily I live in a country (Germany) which learned some lessons from History, so that normally you don not have the duty to bring the case to court. Since you normally only have contracts with your employer, inform him and leave it to him to inform his partners or customers. If what you are doing can not be seen as "fraud" (e.g. buying stock options for a company of which you know that their whole documentation was disclosed by their concurrence) it should be ok. My advice is: if not telling it is not outright criminal (e.g. if a non-disclosure could cause deaths), document what steps you have taken. If you believe that your Employer commits a crime, leave ASAP if your customer base permits.
3) You suspect that something is wrong but you don't know the exact legal situation. Well, after all you are a technician. You are not supposed to analyse contracts. If you create an excel worksheet which helps the secretary to bypass the company-wide bill system and she uses it deliberatly to "tune" some financial values without documenting what she is doing- I think you should not bother with that. Dont think too much about it.
Whenever I glued code by a wrapper i shot myself in the foot very efficiently. Wrappers are the last resort. Wrappers are only acceptable if the coder of the code to be wrapped planned his code to be wrapped. If you use a wrapper adding semantics to a component included by the wrapper is a pain in the ass-you have to change three parts instead of two. If needed or if deployment time is near and there is no time to adopt the code in a good way, then a writing a wrapper has to be carried out with a lot of thinking.
My paradigm would be: only use things as components which were meant to be used as components.
How about comparing the website to untreated depressions? In the region where I live an eduaction campain against depression lowered the suicide rate by 30% in the last 5 years. Whatever one believes if there might be better methods of treating the depression - if the website helps - compared to people which are not treated at all - i think it is a good thing.
Yes, ideed. This was still the time when the idea of malware did not pentrate society to a deep level. I only asked myself: WTF the extraterrestrians build starships as big as cities but they do not protect theyr system at all (they did not even talk about skipping an protection).
Maybe they send a mail like this:
Dear Extraterresrtian friend,
you have not heard of me up to now but i am sure i can trust you. I am the son of the late ruler of this planet and twenty others. However, rihgt now i can not access my power, since enemies of my family have grounded our operations. I now come with a offer to you which i make to you only because i heard of your good morale. If offer you a significant share of my imperium if you can help me to regain power on earth....
if she is not using an patched Verion of licq, where instead of "free for chat" there is just a "free for sex" status. Both set the status, their GPS devices transmit the positions to a small server which checks if they are close enough and then two red arrows appear on the screen pointing in the right direction....
the access of your employees, you have a problem. If you recongnize that one of your employees is addicted, do what you would do when he would be an alcoholic: talk to him and send him to the doctor. If you recongnize that too many employees are addicted or that their attitude towards the job is in a way that they spent thair time on ebay, you should think what's going wrong in your company. Maybe fire you director of human ressources, give mandatory courses to management about how to lead and motivate people. If you come, after all, to the conclusion that somebody is abusing the net and not doing his work because he is the wrong person for the job or the job is the wrong job for him, let him go. No restriction which you set can make him an efficient worker.
The only thing which i would be seriously concerned is security and increased administration cost. I would suggest to request the employes that they do theier private sutt in a virtual machin, which is not connected to the intranet (= on a separate VPN).
> On the other hand, as you say, if they were violating energy conservation then it would invalidate the very fundamentals of physics > which might make it hard to design any meaningful experiments at all.
It is not that it would violate the fundamentals of physics. Justr of the physics we know. And the Noether theorem can be used to clearly state (in the mathematical sense) that the conservation of energy is equivalent residing in an space, which does not change. And exactly that would make it very easy to design experiments which test for this.
On the other hand, as i was told by a friend it seems to be impossible to define the Poynting vector for the gravitional field......
Science - since a long time is based on the principle that you publish your information, and no matter who the other person is - he or she can criticise you (peer review). And, since theories can only be falsified (or to put it in words of a physicist: you can explore in which limit the theory holds), you have to provide openly what you want to falsify. The measure of acceptance for a theory in physics is how many people had the chance to falsify it.
What these guys so is the opposite. They do not publish any information WHAT they acually do. They do not go to a conference ans seek the open criticism. Thy do not go with this discovery to a peer-reviewd journal (this discovery would ensure the Nobel price to the scientist when it is accepted by the peers). No they want to set up a closed jury which they select. Are these people the advisory board or should they just convince the bank? If this circle is closed - may they report on a failure or are they, after beeing selected to be the "jury" only alowed to write positive things about the company. Do they have any kind of NDA? Wre they allowed to disassemble the technology? Will they have financial interests to say yes? Will they be taken to a brainwashing show in a nice hotel in the mountains or will they be sent to the lab? Open questions.....
They claim that Energy conservation does not hold. This either means that the Noether does not hold (and it holds since it is a mathematical law) or that space is not time invariant. An they are right. If you are moving some parts in circles the space is not time invariant. Thats the principle of a generator. But the thesis that the overall energy conservation does not hold is ridiculous - if stated in that way.
Perpetuum mobile exist for a long time and never any Joule of energy was won - still a lot of them are patented. That is because you can apply for a patent without proving that it works.
BTW.: I find it embarassing that perpetuum mobiles are even mentioned on slashdot.
to build a working Quantum Computer until 2007. It would be a nice surprise, actually....
As a small disclaimer: I work in QC field. There are a few approaches to building a superconducting quantum computer, but there are not many experiments coupling even two Qubits. One paper discussing one of the few experiments which worked is:
But there are severe problems with superconducting qubits, namely that the quality of the insulators used in standard processes are not good enough for building a working QC right now. (http://eiffel.ps.uci.edu/cyu/publications/qubit.p df#search=%22mooji%20qubit%22, http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.210 503)
It's not that these fundamental problems could not be adressed by developing better insulators or using other approaches (http://www.solid.phys.ethz.ch/wallraff/content/sc ience/QuantumComp.html, http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.210 503), but it is unlikely that any quantum computer will provide cheaper computing power for NP-hard problems than the cell processor until quite a while from now. In my personal opinion and also the opinion of some other people which i talked to is that the timescale for that is something like 10-15years of intense research.
But indeed, superconductors are one of the best candidates (others: atom traps etc.).
The role of D-Wave is that they are trying to push the development of superconducting QC to something which can be sold or where at least the patents can be sold. So it is natural (and probably good) that the external represantation on what they got is optimistic. But maybe it is important to point out to the slashdot readers that the blog of the CEO of a company is for sure an optimistic assumption what the future may hold and not the full criticism imposed by a peer-review in a scientific journal........
Another thing which makes it difficult to assess what they got is that D-Wave is usually pretty uninformative about what their specific plans are. Thats understandable because they spend a lot of money (for a company) into something where they will get out patents which would be weakened by prior art if they talk to loud.
Well. Imagine that not only your clicks are recorded, but also how long you watch on which part of a web page and where your moise pointer rests longer. Imagine that this data is cross-correlated among websites and that you are classified to be a pedophile because you tend to watch websites with children in swimming suites to long. Imagine that your computer tries to recognize faces in front of your web cam and that it recongnizes that you sometimes leave a friend of yours on the computer. Imagine that your computer tries to analyze what you write and passes a warning to other people about it.....
there was the internet. Then came the Web. The Web made a simple cross-platform access to networkes information possible. The URL was a designation of permanent Resource locations. New features where used only if neccessary.....
and where are we now? Every website has dynamic pages; half of them require a session ID even for dowloading a manual. Three quarters of them require Javascript to read use otherwise static links. Only one fifth of the website seems to afford programmers who can in this complicated world deliver the experience of the early web (=it works), the rest has a vast mixture of flash, javascript and other Stuff - most of the time requireing the newest version of some obscure plugin to be installed.
If yes, then the answer is "no", but not because of linux or windows. In my experience "ordinary users" can not doe anything related to the PC. Computing is something which happens to them. They are not active part of anything which makes decisions. Their brains are so passive that they would sell the personal data of their whole family if anybody offers them a "free" e-mail program which has a nice red button instead of a green one. They click on everything which does not move away quickly enough and they have no personal definition of "spyware". They are fine with EULAS which allow the company to take an data wanted.
So it might be that the person maintainig their computer (which they'll have to have should the device not be the biggest spyware collection in the known universe) makes linux happen to them.
(E.g. once they realize that having the functionality of writing a nice document available for sure is a feature, they usually start to like it. Even my former girlfriend who studied languages and was completly incapable on the computer started to like LaTeX after she saw that she dd not hav any serious problem writing her thesis.).
Obvious choice. The best Kubrick movie ever. The monologue about how to repopulate the world after a few thousand years after living in large bunkers is the best argumentation against nuclear weapons....
Does not depend on the specific implementation of the protocol.
> 2. Realtime response > 3. Low latency
Actuall having these as separate points means that you did not think about what "real time response" means.
I only ask: should it uptdate more often than 60 time a second? So you know that USB has, for example things which are called "isochronous endpoints". Why not to define a bus, which has higher bandwidth (e.g. parallel), but still has "isochronous endpoints".
> So it makes sense that a digital bus specifically optimized for the nature of the traffic be designed.
I don't get the point. A bus definition does not necessarily require symmetric bandwidths...... actually it does not require to specify any bandwidth.
> That's why it is not interested in you listing all the Illustrator stuff from the manual. Instead, it > wants to hear what stuff you REALLY miss in your daily work, why you need it, how it's done in other > apps, and how can it be done differently and better.
I am aware of that; It's just that there are a lot of features which Illustrator has, which make it convenient to use; Anyway i use inkscape....
> Next time you try out an opensource app and find its features below your standards, go compose a detailed > wishlist, with proper argumentation and detailed description for every missing feature.
Um. I do not believ that the programmers of an open source program have nerver worked with a closed source variant of it. I think that most of the open source programmers know quite well which features are missing, but they have one problem: most of them are not paid for doin this work. If you look at Illustrator from Adobe and compare how far beyond the capabilities of even the best open source drawing program (IMHO Inkscape, a really great program. I like it very much), Illustrator is, you'll find that it'll take you less than half an our to isolate important features which keep you busy for man-years. E.g. a working postscript import and other actually working import filters. As I said, I like Inkscape for my daily work (sometimes I use xfig), but If my daily work would be to design nice flyers, or make fancy colorful illustations I'd switch to windows or OS X in less than a day and use Illustrator. I believe that the inkscape programmers know that.
Wouldn't it make more sense to make a "standard bus", which supports isochronous transfers? Maybe over optical fiber? Do displays really need DRM schemes made only for displays?
have a degree in physics (having written small applications in approximately 9-12 languages, depending on what you count) and am working at university. Whenever I talk to new students, i have to note: * The ones which like to program are better than me - they started a few years earlier. * "Intermediate Programmers" e.g. knowing something like 3-4 languages don't exist any more - only students who just learned one language and understand the computer only from this viepoint (=they did not understand the computer; funny things like beeing completely unaware of cache when writing numerical applications sometimes occur).
So I would call it a bipartition..... It seems that the growing complexity of programming systems makes it harder to be of "intermediate skill".
They are not able to spto spyware? DO they want to spyware or is the personal line of "what is spyware" just undefined for them. You ask them: "How does the company which offers you this free software and the free service survive?" The answer: "I never thought about that" You ask: "Where is you personal information stored, here or on the net at the company with an undisclosed busines model?" The answer "I dont care" You ask: "Do you have any kind of conrtact with the company and did you read what they are allowed to do to your data" The Answer: "oh my data is not so valuable". Hey, wake up. You use instant messenging, chat rooms and similar things where you exchange a big part of your personal communication. And you tell me that you actually don't know at all what the companies storing it may do to your data? Would anybody sell me a mobile phone - no even if he make it a present to me - i would not accept the usual terms of use for most of the non-spyware services on the internet. What if they log your communication and made that legal? What if they were only made for beiing baught by the first big company interested in your adresses? If the users are not intersted in their responsibility i can not help them...
Slashdot Mirror
I agree fully with wikipedia (Wikipedia:Academic use; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_us e):
> Do your research assignment properly. Remember that any encyclopedia is a starting point for research, not an ending point.
The problem is that students nowadays (want to) believe that they can find all Information in the net - and that without even logging in to the electronic Journals provided by their library. Even if you find some infromation you should not cite it in that way. The point is not accuracy, but the point is givig scientific tribute to the original authors if the work. So if you say, for example "quantum mechanics was discovered in the beginning of the last century [x]" then [x] could possibly be a reference to an overview Article which celebrates quantum mechanics hundreth birthday, but if you say "the quantization of atomic orbitals [y]", the [y] is no overvie article, no Wikipedia statement but it is somethin with 1905 in it and the name Planck.
If you find the collection of References in a Wikipedia article *particularly good* (e.g. much better, more comprehensive and more up-to-date) that the Physical Review which the Wikipedia article is based upon, you may use the term "An overview of the subject can be found in [y] and the references therein". Let me however clearly state that if the topic of your semester paper is "path integrals" I personally would not accept if a student hand me over something on path integrals where Wikipedia if mentioned, but NOT Feynmans original Paper. One other bad habit which I observed is (regarding standards) to point to some Web page, where documentation is available. If a standard (the case where I remember it was a Color Managment Standard) is so important that you mention it's name and a so central topic that you believe a citation is needed, then PLEASE: Standards have a year, a name (sometimes complex), usually a number, and very important: the organization responsible. It should be clearly visible from your Reference that Postscript was issued by Adobe (Don't cite some obscure textbook, this may cause the impression that the Adobe Postscript is just one Implementation of the language) and that, on the other hand some specific Version of C you used is ANSI compliant (so don't cite the microsoft C reference manual if you were asked to validate that a certain statement is ANSI compliant).
My recommendation: log in to you libraries electronic yournals. I can now only give this advice for Physics, but there you should as a student try to figure out which "Physical Review" (Be aware that PRL has short papers, whle PR has the long ones) covers your topic (It is very likely that there is some which does, especially in theoretical physics). Read the abstract and think about it (no connection to the net during thinking!). Can you translate it to your language (modern, more appropriate for students)? If no: look which works cite this article. Follow the most cited ones - it might be that you find the formulation [x] and articles cited therein very appropriate when you arrived at a suitable article (however if it is a 100page article, you may give the reader a hint about the section.....). Recurse this until you understand the first article.
Wikipedia is only good for finding the first article.
Nothing will solve this problem other than having the users educated and responsible. Instead of finally telling to the users that they should take the responsibility for their system right now the approach is to make fucking heuristic schemes or to silently make the assumption that a certificate issued by a list of organization is valid. Instead of putting an simple explanation besides the Warning dialog when you open a web page which enables the user to find out whom he actually trusts to, the dialog boxes for self-signed certificates and such signed by an CA look quite similar to the normal user. Morover in everydays life nearly nobody uses ceritifactes. One approach would be to sell one certificate per Computer (or OS license) right when you buy it. And the users should be asked when they would like to sign (and encrypt!) something (e.g. email!). Moreover they should be explained how they can easily sign things themself. And an simple to use scheme should be implemented which allows to say something like: Trust everybody whom my direct contact trust to. Take the Administrator of your Company in your Adressbook and because he trusts certain company signatures (for certain purposes eg. installing drivers) you will not be bothered in the future when a company did only sign the drivers using a certificate not issued by a CA.
Guiding the users to more responsibility is the only thing which can help - in all security affairs.
What exactly makes you believe that a cesar cyper (and "rotating" the letters is nothing else) increases the security? As I said there is too little entropy in this. Would I be given the task to enhance a malware in a way that it works against this scheme i would only have to grab the first letter "button" displayed (always at the same position -> easy), compare it to all letters (easy, they do not even put noise on the buttons) and add its character value to the standard table. So the task which this piece of software should solve (malware infected computers) is only solved under the assumption that all malware writers are incompetent idiots, who will use keyloggers forever.
Benefits of this protection scheme:
*protects against yesterdays (at the time when it will be widely used) malware on the users computer
Disadvantages:
* frustrates user (i tried to enter a longer passwd using the rotation scheme)
* a malware which is aware of the scheme can bypass it with at most (number of pixels to compare for first letter)*(letters to compare) ~8000 byte comparisons. On a modern processor if you implement it well this should take only a few S per entered digit
* maybe: timing analysis on the network
* increased server load
* over slow connections or connections with lag (GPRS,VPN) this scheme makes the user feel the lag
* increased transfer cost on mobile devices (if you go online in a foreing country with your mobile phone you might prefer to avoid such things
At least in their demo the entropy in the assignment between the coordinates and the numbers input is completely missing. Not a good "encryption" or "security" scheme.
Full Ack. If you work for somebody and you are paid for that there are three possibilities:
1) Everything is ok and you know that everything is ok
2) Something is wrong and you know that it is wrong (wrong in the sense of being illegal). Estimate (maybe with the help of a lawyer) if you commit a crime by supporting your employers position. Luckily I live in a country (Germany) which learned some lessons from History, so that normally you don not have the duty to bring the case to court. Since you normally only have contracts with your employer, inform him and leave it to him to inform his partners or customers. If what you are doing can not be seen as "fraud" (e.g. buying stock options for a company of which you know that their whole documentation was disclosed by their concurrence) it should be ok. My advice is: if not telling it is not outright criminal (e.g. if a non-disclosure could cause deaths), document what steps you have taken. If you believe that your Employer commits a crime, leave ASAP if your customer base permits.
3) You suspect that something is wrong but you don't know the exact legal situation. Well, after all you are a technician. You are not supposed to analyse contracts. If you create an excel worksheet which helps the secretary to bypass the company-wide bill system and she uses it deliberatly to "tune" some financial values without documenting what she is doing- I think you should not bother with that. Dont think too much about it.
Whenever I glued code by a wrapper i shot myself in the foot very efficiently. Wrappers are the last resort. Wrappers are only acceptable if the coder of the code to be wrapped planned his code to be wrapped. If you use a wrapper adding semantics to a component included by the wrapper is a pain in the ass-you have to change three parts instead of two. If needed or if deployment time is near and there is no time to adopt the code in a good way, then a writing a wrapper has to be carried out with a lot of thinking.
My paradigm would be: only use things as components which were meant to be used as components.
How about comparing the website to untreated depressions? In the region where I live an eduaction campain against depression lowered the suicide rate by 30% in the last 5 years. Whatever one believes if there might be better methods of treating the depression - if the website helps - compared to people which are not treated at all - i think it is a good thing.
Yes, ideed. This was still the time when the idea of malware did not pentrate society to a deep level. I only asked myself: WTF the extraterrestrians build starships as big as cities but they do not protect theyr system at all (they did not even talk about skipping an protection).
Maybe they send a mail like this:
Dear Extraterresrtian friend,
you have not heard of me up to now but i am sure i can trust you. I am the son of the late ruler of this planet and twenty others. However, rihgt now i can not access my power, since enemies of my family have grounded our operations. I now come with a offer to you which i make to you only because i heard of your good morale. If offer you a significant share of my imperium if you can help me to regain power on earth....
if she is not using an patched Verion of licq, where instead of "free for chat" there is just a "free for sex" status. Both set the status, their GPS devices transmit the positions to a small server which checks if they are close enough and then two red arrows appear on the screen pointing in the right direction....
the access of your employees, you have a problem. If you recongnize that one of your employees is addicted, do what you would do when he would be an alcoholic: talk to him and send him to the doctor. If you recongnize that too many employees are addicted or that their attitude towards the job is in a way that they spent thair time on ebay, you should think what's going wrong in your company. Maybe fire you director of human ressources, give mandatory courses to management about how to lead and motivate people. If you come, after all, to the conclusion that somebody is abusing the net and not doing his work because he is the wrong person for the job or the job is the wrong job for him, let him go. No restriction which you set can make him an efficient worker.
The only thing which i would be seriously concerned is security and increased administration cost. I would suggest to request the employes that they do theier private sutt in a virtual machin, which is not connected to the intranet (= on a separate VPN).
> On the other hand, as you say, if they were violating energy conservation then it would invalidate the very fundamentals of physics > which might make it hard to design any meaningful experiments at all.
It is not that it would violate the fundamentals of physics. Justr of the physics we know. And the Noether theorem can be used to clearly state (in the mathematical sense) that the conservation of energy is equivalent residing in an space, which does not change. And exactly that would make it very easy to design experiments which test for this.
On the other hand, as i was told by a friend it seems to be impossible to define the Poynting vector for the gravitional field......
Science - since a long time is based on the principle that you publish your information, and no matter who the other person is - he or she can criticise you (peer review). And, since theories can only be falsified (or to put it in words of a physicist: you can explore in which limit the theory holds), you have to provide openly what you want to falsify. The measure of acceptance for a theory in physics is how many people had the chance to falsify it.
What these guys so is the opposite. They do not publish any information WHAT they acually do. They do not go to a conference ans seek the open criticism. Thy do not go with this discovery to a peer-reviewd journal (this discovery would ensure the Nobel price to the scientist when it is accepted by the peers). No they want to set up a closed jury which they select. Are these people the advisory board or should they just convince the bank? If this circle is closed - may they report on a failure or are they, after beeing selected to be the "jury" only alowed to write positive things about the company. Do they have any kind of NDA? Wre they allowed to disassemble the technology? Will they have financial interests to say yes? Will they be taken to a brainwashing show in a nice hotel in the mountains or will they be sent to the lab? Open questions.....
They claim that Energy conservation does not hold. This either means that the Noether does not hold (and it holds since it is a mathematical law) or that space is not time invariant. An they are right. If you are moving some parts in circles the space is not time invariant. Thats the principle of a generator. But the thesis that the overall energy conservation does not hold is ridiculous - if stated in that way.
Perpetuum mobile exist for a long time and never any Joule of energy was won - still a lot of them are patented. That is because you can apply for a patent without proving that it works.
BTW.: I find it embarassing that perpetuum mobiles are even mentioned on slashdot.
to build a working Quantum Computer until 2007. It would be a nice surprise, actually....
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c ience/QuantumComp.html, http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.210 503), but it is unlikely that any quantum computer will provide cheaper computing power for NP-hard problems than the cell processor until quite a while from now. In my personal opinion and also the opinion of some other people which i talked to is that the timescale for that is something like 10-15years of intense research.
As a small disclaimer: I work in QC field. There are a few approaches to building a superconducting quantum computer, but there are not many experiments coupling even two Qubits. One paper discussing one of the few experiments which worked is:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:%22Pas
But there are severe problems with superconducting qubits, namely that the quality of the insulators used in standard processes are not good enough for building a working QC right now.
(http://eiffel.ps.uci.edu/cyu/publications/qubit.
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.21
It's not that these fundamental problems could not be adressed by developing better insulators or using other approaches
(http://www.solid.phys.ethz.ch/wallraff/content/s
But indeed, superconductors are one of the best candidates (others: atom traps etc.).
The role of D-Wave is that they are trying to push the development of superconducting QC to something which can be sold or where at least the patents can be sold. So it is natural (and probably good) that the external represantation on what they got is optimistic. But maybe it is important to point out to the slashdot readers that the blog of the CEO of a company is for sure an optimistic assumption what the future may hold and not the full criticism imposed by a peer-review in a scientific journal........
Another thing which makes it difficult to assess what they got is that D-Wave is usually pretty uninformative about what their specific plans are. Thats understandable because they spend a lot of money (for a company) into something where they will get out patents which would be weakened by prior art if they talk to loud.
Well. Imagine that not only your clicks are recorded, but also how long you watch on which part of a web page and where your moise pointer rests longer. Imagine that this data is cross-correlated among websites and that you are classified to be a pedophile because you tend to watch websites with children in swimming suites to long. Imagine that your computer tries to recognize faces in front of your web cam and that it recongnizes that you sometimes leave a friend of yours on the computer. Imagine that your computer tries to analyze what you write and passes a warning to other people about it.....
Either you know what you are doing - or not.
there was the internet. Then came the Web. The Web made a simple cross-platform access to networkes information possible. The URL was a designation of permanent Resource locations. New features where used only if neccessary.....
and where are we now? Every website has dynamic pages; half of them require a session ID even for dowloading a manual. Three quarters of them require Javascript to read use otherwise static links. Only one fifth of the website seems to afford programmers who can in this complicated world deliver the experience of the early web (=it works), the rest has a vast mixture of flash, javascript and other Stuff - most of the time requireing the newest version of some obscure plugin to be installed.
Punchcards....
what a luxury....
a few switchen on the front panel should do it for all you need.
If yes, then the answer is "no", but not because of linux or windows. In my experience "ordinary users" can not doe anything related to the PC. Computing is something which happens to them. They are not active part of anything which makes decisions. Their brains are so passive that they would sell the personal data of their whole family if anybody offers them a "free" e-mail program which has a nice red button instead of a green one. They click on everything which does not move away quickly enough and they have no personal definition of "spyware". They are fine with EULAS which allow the company to take an data wanted.
So it might be that the person maintainig their computer (which they'll have to have should the device not be the biggest spyware collection in the known universe) makes linux happen to them.
(E.g. once they realize that having the functionality of writing a nice document available for sure is a feature, they usually start to like it. Even my former girlfriend who studied languages and was completly incapable on the computer started to like LaTeX after she saw that she dd not hav any serious problem writing her thesis.).
Obvious choice. The best Kubrick movie ever. The monologue about how to repopulate the world after a few thousand years after living in large bunkers is the best argumentation against nuclear weapons....
> 1. Bandwidth
Does not depend on the specific implementation of the protocol.
> 2. Realtime response
> 3. Low latency
Actuall having these as separate points means that you did not think about what "real time response" means.
I only ask: should it uptdate more often than 60 time a second? So you know that USB has, for example things which are called "isochronous endpoints". Why not to define a bus, which has higher bandwidth (e.g. parallel), but still has "isochronous endpoints".
> So it makes sense that a digital bus specifically optimized for the nature of the traffic be designed.
I don't get the point. A bus definition does not necessarily require symmetric bandwidths...... actually it does not require to specify any bandwidth.
> That's why it is not interested in you listing all the Illustrator stuff from the manual. Instead, it
> wants to hear what stuff you REALLY miss in your daily work, why you need it, how it's done in other
> apps, and how can it be done differently and better.
I am aware of that; It's just that there are a lot of features which Illustrator has, which make it convenient to use; Anyway i use inkscape....
> Next time you try out an opensource app and find its features below your standards, go compose a detailed
> wishlist, with proper argumentation and detailed description for every missing feature.
Um. I do not believ that the programmers of an open source program have nerver worked with a closed source variant of it. I think that most of the open source programmers know quite well which features are missing, but they have one problem: most of them are not paid for doin this work. If you look at Illustrator from Adobe and compare how far beyond the capabilities of even the best open source drawing program (IMHO Inkscape, a really great program. I like it very much), Illustrator is, you'll find that it'll take you less than half an our to isolate important features which keep you busy for man-years. E.g. a working postscript import and other actually working import filters. As I said, I like Inkscape for my daily work (sometimes I use xfig), but If my daily work would be to design nice flyers, or make fancy colorful illustations I'd switch to windows or OS X in less than a day and use Illustrator. I believe that the inkscape programmers know that.
Wouldn't it make more sense to make a "standard bus", which supports isochronous transfers? Maybe over optical fiber? Do displays really need DRM schemes made only for displays?
have a degree in physics (having written small applications in approximately 9-12 languages, depending on what you count) and am working at university. Whenever I talk to new students, i have to note:
* The ones which like to program are better than me - they started a few years earlier.
* "Intermediate Programmers" e.g. knowing something like 3-4 languages don't exist any more - only students who just learned one language and understand the computer only from this viepoint (=they did not understand the computer; funny things like beeing completely unaware of cache when writing numerical applications sometimes occur).
So I would call it a bipartition..... It seems that the growing complexity of programming systems makes it harder to be of "intermediate skill".
They are not able to spto spyware? DO they want to spyware or is the personal line of "what is spyware" just undefined for them. You ask them: "How does the company which offers you this free software and the free service survive?" The answer: "I never thought about that" You ask: "Where is you personal information stored, here or on the net at the company with an undisclosed busines model?" The answer "I dont care" You ask: "Do you have any kind of conrtact with the company and did you read what they are allowed to do to your data" The Answer: "oh my data is not so valuable". Hey, wake up. You use instant messenging, chat rooms and similar things where you exchange a big part of your personal communication. And you tell me that you actually don't know at all what the companies storing it may do to your data? Would anybody sell me a mobile phone - no even if he make it a present to me - i would not accept the usual terms of use for most of the non-spyware services on the internet. What if they log your communication and made that legal? What if they were only made for beiing baught by the first big company interested in your adresses? If the users are not intersted in their responsibility i can not help them...